Policy
1. Aims and scope
German Medical Science (GMS) is the interdisciplinary publishing platform of the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies (AWMF). Founded in cooperation with the German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information, DIMDI (today: Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices – BfArM) and the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), GMS offers open access to peer-reviewed medical publications.
German Medical Science provides all scientists from the medical field the opportunity to publish their research results and data as journal articles, congress papers or research reports online. Within the scope of its technical and organizational capacities, GMS is committed to
- ensure that all documents are freely and permanently accessible;
- archive documents on a long-term basis and to make them accessible in the databases of the BfArM;
- assure citability by means of persistent identifiers;
- disseminate the publications in national and international reference databases.
2. Open access policy and copyright
All publications of GMS are open access documents and are licensed under the Creative Commons license terms. They may be reproduced, distributed and made publicly available, provided that authors and source are cited. As of 2015, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License generally applies (license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Each article includes the corresponding license information.
The authors retain all rights to their publications. They only grant GMS the non-exclusive right of use to online publication and its electronic storage in databases. These conditions are detailed in the GMS authors’ contract.
3. Technical maintenance, long-term availability, and security
Technical provider of the platform is BfArM. It is aimed at that all documents maintain free accessibility. Provided there is no fundamental change in the preconditions of the BfArM services, the minimum availability period is five years. In justified cases, access can be restricted spatially (e.g., restriction or exclusion of IP ranges) or temporally.
Digital preservation of published content is ensured by ZB MED (for further information, see https://www.publisso.de/en/digital-preservation/). ZB MED operates a long-term archiving system in corporation with two German National Subject Libraries – TIB and ZBW – using the Rosetta software which is hosted and operated by TIB. In addition, journals are also archived by the German National Library; journals listed at PubMed Central will be archived there as well.
For permanent citeablity, documents receive distinct persistent identifiers (DOI, digital object identifier and URN, uniform resource name). Any necessary changes to the publications are documented and made visible by errata. For withdrawn contributions, the metadata remains visible.
4. Indexing and coverage by databases
The electronic documents are bibliographically recorded in XML format using structured metadata that conforms to the Dublin Core metadata standards. They are published online on the GMS at www.egms.de and are searchable via the BfArM databases. The structure of the databases is documented here
- Database Information German Medical Science
- Database Information German Medical Science Meeting
Keywords for indexing are generally provided by the author in German and English.
Depending on the qualification and inclusion of the respective GMS journal, the contributions will be integrated into various national and international databases and search portals, such as. BASE, DOAJ , LIVIVO, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, and Web of Science.
5. Publication types and user groups
GMS contains three publication categories:
1. Journals
Only peer-reviewed articles from various medical disciplines will be published. Evaluating high quality is the responsibility of the publishing societies. Authors can submit their manuscript either to our interdisciplinary journal “GMS German Medical Science – An Interdisciplinary Journal” or to one of the discipline-specific journals. “GMS German Medical Science – An Interdisciplinary Journal” is the online journal of the AWMF and publishes interdisciplinary research and review articles from the entire spectrum of medicine. The subject-specific journals edited by individual societies publish scientific research and review articles from the respective subject area. For easy submission and review processes, GMS provides a web-based manuscript management system.
Technical processing as well as layout and typesetting of manuscripts accepted for publication is carried out by the GMS editorial team or the editorial offices of the respective GMS journal. An in-house developed publication software is used for this purpose. For specific manuscript guidelines, please visit the respective journal’s website.
If you are interested in launching a new journal or in adding an existing one to GMS, we will be pleased to assist you.
2. Meetings
This includes abstracts, proceedings, and reports of scientific medical conferences and meetings. Publication will only occur after a publication contract has been concluded with the hosting society. Hereby, the scientific society has the responsibility of quality control and the structural arrangement of the publication.
Contributions can be submitted either by using a submission tool provided by GMS or by using the congress organizer’s own submission tools. The GMS editorial office prepares and processes the contributions for publication.
3. Research reports
HTA reports from the German Agency for Health Technology Assessment (DAHTA) are available in this category.
6. Business model and publication fees
To maintain the sustainability of the GMS, a business model has been developed in which costs – including peer review, editing, online hosting, and archiving – are partially covered by publication fees. These fees are covered by the editing societies and depend on the number of articles and the amount of editorial work necessary.
Some GMS journals charge publication fees to authors. This is specified on the website of the respective journals under the tab “Authors” in the paragraph “General Information”.
